Peter Keen, the former performance director at UK Sport and the founder of today's all-conquering Great Britain track cycling team, has called for the inception of a process of truth and reconciliation within professional road cycling to enable the sport to draw a line in the sand and move forward in the wake of the devastating revelations in Usada's report into doping at Lance Armstrong's US Postal Service team.

Keen launched the GB cycling squad in 1998 on the basis that it would be as distant as possible from professional road racing, which he viewed as tainted by doping. Central to that distancing was a policy of no needles or drips being used by the team, and mandatory regular blood tests which ended up, insiders say, creating a data bank which was as detailed as the UCI's biological passport. The idea of a truth and reconciliation process is not a new one for him.

"Based on what I'd seen, what I'd heard and been aware of, it was clear the truth needed to be out there, but that can't happen if it all turns into a witch-hunt. What it would take is a group of trustworthy individuals to interview people on a basis of anonymity, capture the facts, and their output would be a dossier that says for this period of time, this is what people did, and most critically of all it would say this is what needs to be done to stop them doing it again. For example, if it's clear that team doctors who work independently may go native or do things which are wrong, because there is no chain of accountability, that would need to change."

Another option, Keen suggests, would be an anonymous deposition or confessional process. "Get everyone in a room, 'here are the forms', 'here are the questionnaires', put them in brown envelopes and put them in a box and go out. And the key question would be: 'If you crossed the line and doped, when and where did it happen and who was around you?'"

The idea of a truth and reconciliation process was mooted briefly by the UCI president Pat McQuaid, who has yet to react to the Usada findings. It was also raised by Travis Tygart, Usada's head, who said: "Allowing individuals like the riders mentioned [in the Usada report] to come forward and acknowledge the truth of their past doping may be the only way to truly dismantle the remaining system that allowed that era to flourish. Hopefully, the sport can unshackle itself from the past."

Opinion within cycling is divided, with the UCI rejecting the idea at its congress in September in spite of support from its former anti-doping head, Anne Gripper. One expert who has spoken out against it is Robin Parisotto, who said he did not think that "a truth and reconciliation process would unearth anything that the public does not already know or suspect; that doping is very sophisticated, highly organised and fosters an underlying culture of cheating that reaches down to the grassroots level of the sport. Would every doping cyclist really want to go through the agony of reliving the lies and cover-ups, and implicate others around them in doing so? Would the UCI have the stomach to confront and defend potentially further damning confessions and allegations?"

For years there has been a feeling within cycling that until the truth about Armstrong and those around him – Johan Bruyneel, Tyler Hamilton, Michele Ferrari – emerged, the sport would never move on. But the question of what happens now is the critical one. First up, there are the immediate ramifications. A flock of chickens will come home to roost in the henhouse Armstrong has defended so vehemently for so long. The Sunday Times has hinted that, not unreasonably, it will countersue him in the wake of the libel case the Texan filed against them in 2004, which went his way and did so much to ensure writers and their editors treated any allegations about him with extreme care.

SCA, the company that insured Armstrong's win bonuses and contested them when the first doping allegations against him emerged in 2004, may well want to revisit the arbitration case against him. There are further mutterings of perjury charges arising from the Texan's flat denials that he had doped or that he was working with the trainer Michele Ferrari.

Merely rooting out anyone who is associated with Armstrong or named in the Usada report is not going to remove links to past scandals and create a squeaky clean sport as has been evidenced by the events of the past two days. On Friday, Armstrong's former directeur sportif Bruyneel quit from his post as the head of the RadioShack team in the wake of Usada's findings about Armstrong. The reins, it now seems, will be picked up by his deputy Kim Andersen, who tested positive for drugs no fewer than seven times, becoming one of the rare riders to earn a life ban in the days when it was virtually unheard of due to the leniency with which cheats were treated.

By Saturday morning, Matt White, the directeur sportif at Orica-Greenedge, the top Australian pro team, had confessed to doping during his time with Armstrong, and had resigned pending investigation. White's No2 is Neil Stephens, one of the nine Festina riders who were thrown off the Tour de France in 1998 after confirmation of systematic blood doping at the heart of the scandal which, until the Armstrong revelations, was the sport's darkest hour. Stephens never confessed to doping, stating that he thought he had been given vitamin injections.

"There is still endless speculation about what people do and don't do," acknowledges Keen, who says he is saddened by "a massive contrast to an extraordinary summer of Olympic and Paralympic sport which in the vast majority of cases is untainted by what we're talking about here".

He adds: "But my perception is that the peleton wants to move on, because of the sheer lunacy of it all, the collective madness of everyone doing the same time and ending up poorer and less healthy for it. The most important thing is to try and see it through the minds of the athletes, what it feels like, what they think.

"You end up with a massive sample survey – which needs to be non-attributable – which can say what the scale of it was, how it was done, what was being done. And if it's still doable, things have to change. You need to start with something that looks like truth or doubts will remain. It is a massive opportunity for change within the sport but it needs leadership from the UCI and a collective response from the riders."

The former French racing cyclist Christophe Bassons, who was told to leave the Tour de France and 'go home' by disgraced champion Lance Armstrong after speaking out about doping, said he did not feel bitter towards the American